Florian's Blog

Photo published in Travel+Leisure but wait til you read this

We just had 2 days of intense debate over some shared content on my Posterous page when this email hits my inbox:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: XXX XXXX <yyyyyyyy@aexp.com>
Date: Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 4:04 PM
Subject: Laduree
To: xxxxxxx@gmail.com

Hi Florian,

Please send me an invoice for $250 for your image of Laduree that ran a quarter page in our September issue.  The story name is “Airline Food.”

Thanks,

Jessica

–
XXXX XXXXX
Associate Photo Editor

Travel + Leisure
1120 Avenue of the Americas, 9th floor
New York, NY 10036
www.travelandleisure.com

September 09 issue must have been published and sent for printing late August. I guess my picture of Ladurée macarons in Paris airport was picked up on Flickr. Even though my privacy and permission policy is stated on each picture no one contacted me on behalf of the magazine.

Nonetheless the picture was taken, cropped, published and printed without my permission. Out from the blue and a month after the fact I receive an email asking for a $250 invoice. hmmm talking about journalistic ethics and moral this is legend.

Why $250, why not $20 or $5000? I don’t get it.

Wild guess is someone at Travel Leisure is following my Twitter stream and decided to make a move avoiding any bad publicity. Further down you will see they had nothing to fear.

100’s of my pics end up on the web everyday. Most of the reprints are on blogs, some ad supported some not. Recently I noticed an increase of my photos used on commercial news related site and papers. It’s very difficult if not impossible to track photos published in newspapers or magazines. On websites I can use some tools based on tags, keywords, search and events but usually viewers are prompt to alert me.

Below few examples of reprinted pics/videos on commercial websites posted without permission:

http://www.cafebabel.com/eng/article/29690/bernard-madoff-fraud-europe-victims-banks.html

http://varl.jp/i-see-stock/wordpress-plugin-photo-dropper

http://www.portaldenoticias.com/videos/yt-u4MaQ-LOFnw

http://www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/diggs-kevin-rose-weve-got-be-more-relevant (no credit given – here is original pic)

Schmap.com (check pic of Ritz Carlton in Key Biscayne on right column)

and countless French, US newspapers and magazines.

I receive requests on regular basis asking for permission to reprint my photos. Honestly I don’t have the time and energy to deal with that. A couple of travel guides asked me for reprint rights offering money which I promptly granted for FREE.

One picture in particular caught public attention causing tens of emails.

Question: how many pics are used without permission in conventional press? Maybe NYT has the answer.

Now here is my position : you can use, copy, reprint, publish, distribute, share any of my original material – pictures, videos or texts with no limitation. I’m just asking you give me proper credit. You do not have to link to the original, you do not have to ask me permission. You do not have to pay anything. I would appreciate being notified of published images, texts or videos as an act of courtesy but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.

You can’t steal what is given freely. I call this sharing, not piracy.

PS: my reply to Travel+Leisure was obviously consistent with this post. No money involved, no permission needed.

Tags: flickr, laduree, leisure, magazines, permission, pircay, publication, rights, Travel

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Art, Content, Legal, Photography, Pikchur, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.